If news of the Pfizer vaccine had arrived last week, would Trump have avoided defeat?

A vaccine announcement might have persuaded enough of Trump’s supporters to stick with him

Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic may have persuaded many voters to desert him (Reuters)

The scientists are reportedly “grinning from ear to ear”, and that tells us a great deal about the Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19. If these usually cautious souls are allowing themselves a modicum of joy at their breakthrough, then the rest of us can go off and get drunk, in a socially distanced manner, of course. The contrast between our overpromising but underdelivering politicians could hardly be more stark or instructive.

Which brings us to the politics of the vaccine. Could, for example, this news have saved Donald Trump from his current torments? It seems perfectly possible. At the start of the year, the president’s dismal approval ratings were starting to improve, and there was some optimism, however misplaced, about the prospects for the economy.

The president’s woeful mishandling of the pandemic cost lives, as well as his job. But at least if they’d announced a vaccine was indeed around the corner, as he suggested, then he might have persuaded enough of his supporters, disappointed about the advice that disinfectant cures it, to stick with him.

Studying the electoral and Covid maps of the US, it looked like “the base” wasn’t bothered about the death toll and voted for him anyway, in person and without a mask; but the more undecided voters might have granted Trump the benefit of the doubt. The crude calculation is that if Covid really is about to go away, then whatever mess Trump made of it is a matter of history; and if you think the economy is about to revert to its pre-Covid health, then you might go back to Trump.

Boris Johnson may be hoping such thoughts will soon pass through the heads of the electorate and Conservative MPs dismayed at Britain’s utter failure to get control of the coronavirus and “send it packing” last summer, as promised. Some, particularly those directly affected will never forgive him or his government; and there can be few in the country who have not had their lives touched in some way by this appalling illness.

Yet as the vaccine helps to create herd immunity and life returns to normal, and the memories of deaths and the nightmares of lockdown recede, then so will the salience of Covid decline as a political issue. The general election of 2024 is some way off, after all.

Johnson seems much luckier than Trump in terms of the electoral timing of the Covid crisis. Unless, of course, the new strain of the virus that has been, bizarrely, incubated among Danish “companies” of mink (the correct collective noun there, by the way) proves resistant to the new vaccine. In which case the folk at Pfizer will have to start all over again and Britain will be back at miserable square one – a pandemic and a government with not a clue as to what to do about it.